About Me

This journal -- the antecedent to the blog -- gets its start from a
decision to dig up all the grass in our yard and plant flowers,
perennials, ground cover, shrubs, a small tree or two, berry bushes,
vegetables. My first title for it, I remember now, was "The Amateur." I
am fond of the word's Latin roots -- it means "lover." I'm not trained,
I'm not a professional, I just began digging things up and planting. To
be an amateur means to do something not for money, but for love. Five
summers later, I am still an amateur, but the place has blossomed. I
loved the development stage; now I'm working on management, maintenance
-- skills that require patience. I like doing things, trying things, and
seeing what happens. I experiment, I learn from experience (or try to).
I love to see things growing. I love the idea that when we step
outdoors, we are in nature. The "environment" begins at the doorstep.
Open the door; breathe the air; listen. Today a cardinal sat on the head
of a sunflower, bobbing and calling, looking for all the world as if he
had just lost something. I noticed he ate a few sunflower seeds too.
There is always something to see.Here's the "interests" list:

Sunday, February 26, 2017

The Garden of Shame: Are We Ready Yet for James Baldwin?

Photo: Magnolia Pictures

The film has no
narrator. At times actor Samuel L. Jackson speaks words that American writer James Baldwin
wrote. Sometimes Baldwin is seen on screen speaking on talk shows,
at a Cambridge, England debate, or in brief clips from interviews given decades ago.

The film "I Am Not
Your Negro" by Raoul Peck is not 'about' the life or work of James
Baldwin, his life, his autobiography, his literary oeuvre.

It's not a biopic.

It's about what he said.
What he said about America.

Baldwin's words are more relevant, and revelatory, than ever. Reviewer Nicolas Rapold offers the
best definition I've seen of this film: a "masterfully eloquent
living essay on race and America."

The title "I Am Not Your Negro"is something Baldwin said. Meaning, I take it,
that neither he, nor any other person of color, of African ancestry, is to be
seen from "your" perspective. Which is to say that white people
invented the 'negro': that there is no such thing as a 'negro' without a white
person to see a black one as the "other."

Baldwin -- who was born
in Harlem in 1924 and died in 1987 -- sees himself, as the film unquestionably demonstrates, as an "American."

The movie asks us -- through the accumulation of images rather than bald statement -- where does all this hate from
other Americans, the white ones, for people like Baldwin, come from?

Since seeing this film
I've been reminding myself of the dirty secret that has come to light so
frequently in recent years: That American police shoot, kill, and otherwise
mistreat African Americans as they would not dream of treating anyone else. And
that America's public officials, its governing establishment, its courts, its
mayors, its police chiefs, back them up -- no matter what they do. (With some
exceptions, I suppose. But after the cavalcade of visually documented horrors
that flash by in "I Am Not Your Negro" it's hard to remember them.)

That could be us, could
be me, white people think when some
pathetic creature in a uniform explains why he had to kill an unarmed black
man. A dirty little thing in our conscience offers us the answer: we don't
really think these people are human, do we?

We are afraid, we think.
And we think we are right to be afraid.

As another of the film's
recent reviewers (Kenneth Turan in the "LA Times") pointed out, the
film's message, insofar as it can be reduced, is encapsulated in its first few
minutes.

No narrative is
offered. No titles tell you what you are seeing, or when, or the names of the
images on the screen.

If you are old enough to
recognize the faces, you know that we're seeing footage from the "Dick
Cavett Show." A liberal's show. The year (a review tells me) is 1968.
The wave of the "Civil
Rights Era," the famous demonstrations, the landmark federal laws, has
crested by 1968 and is on the way down, though that may not be obvious at the
time. But that's the background, the legal gains of the Civil Rights era, for
Cavett's question: “Why aren’t Negroes more optimistic — it’s getting so
much better.”

As a look of almost
horror-movie 'weariness' overtakes his features -- and Baldwin's facial expressions can be as
eloquent as his words -- he replies, “It’s not a question of what
happens to the Negro. The real question is what is going to happen to this
country.”

What
appears to be happening, we learn from a brief excerpt Baldwin's appearance at another
public forum is that white Americans are allowing themselves to
become “moral monsters” through unexamined bigotry.

We see
expressions of hatred, and hateful acts, more intense than we were allowed to see on TV or in film footage back in the sixties. The
prospect of a female African American teenager integrating a high school turns white
protestors into a mass of seething devils. They look, and behave, like something
out of Bosch's medieval depictions of hell.

These images are
intercut with words from others, from Baldwin, from newscasters, white racists,
politicians, exclamations of grief from the loved ones of victims. The film moves
very fast, without regard to obvious chronology, narrative line, plot, or
expository framework. It offers footage from the Civil Rights era;
footage from the Ferguson demonstrations. No one is telling you how, but you know, you feel,
how it all fits together. It's the densest hour and a half I can recall
experiencing, on film or anywhere else.

When you
try to use words afterwards to explain its effect, you come up with something
like this:

Black
Americans are not a faction, a racial group, or a census demographic, and they're certainly
not a monolithic 'community.' They are Americans. You can't separate them out;
they don't exist anywhere but here.

And America
is not America apart from them. And yet, white Americans can't seem to accept
who we are as Americans. And that failure is killing us.